St Peter's Church, Winterbourne Stoke, SP3 4SX

 The village (pop 165, 38 children) is the second smallest in the Benefice and closest to Stonehenge.  The village has a mixture of traditional houses (including eight Grade 2 Listed properties) and more recent developments, as well as 4 almshouses, administered by the Jubilee Trust.  The River Till runs through the village; there is a pub, the Bell Inn, a garage with a shop and a children’s recreation ground.  With no village hall, the church and pub are used to host village events. 

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More about the church taken from the village website

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Look carefully round the outside walls of St Peter’s Church, particularly on the southern and the western sides and you may spot some curious scratch marks and carvings. They are mostly, though not all, between waist and head height and are of various styles. You’d be forgiven for thinking these were acts of simple graffiti, carried out by our ancestors, but that is far from the case. The conventional wisdom is that these are scratch-dials or mass dials; very simple sundials created by boring a hole into a stone block on the south side of a church, or sometimes between two blocks, into which a wooden stick or iron rod could be inserted. The line of shadows cast by the stick, at dawn, noon and dusk would be scratched into the stone, to give a rudimentary clock; hence the name ‘scratch-dial’. When used to record the start of mass (9:00am), they are known as Mass dials. There are the remains of 9 or 10 at St Peter’s. 

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